As one of the most efficient means of self-preservation it was recommended by the Executive to the coördinate branch of Government; for to deprive the cotton States of the hope of being joined by the border States would, he said, “substantially end the rebellion; and the initiation of emancipation completely deprives them of it as to all the States initiating it. The point is not that all the States tolerating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate emancipation; but that while the offer is equally made to all, the more Northern shall, by such initiation, make it certain to the more Southern that in no event will the former ever join the latter in their proposed confederacy.” Gradual emancipation he believed better for all concerned. The current expenditures of the war would soon purchase, at a fair valuation, all the slaves in any named State. However, it was proposed as a matter of perfectly free choice. “In the annual message, last December,” continued the President, “I thought fit to say, ‘the Union must be preserved, and hence all indispensable means must be employed.’ I said this not hastily, but deliberately. War has been made and continues to be an indispensable means to this end. A practical re-acknowledgment of the national authority would render the war unnecessary, and it would at once cease. If, however, resistance continues, the war must also continue; and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it. Such as may seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency, toward ending the struggle, must and will come.”
The message inquired “whether the pecuniary consideration tendered would not be of more value to the States and private persons concerned than are the institution and property in it, in the present aspect of affairs?”[[247]]
This was really a great step in advance; by many it was regarded as a direct and positive interference with the domestic institutions of the States; it was certainly a preliminary movement to get rid of slavery. The deliberate opinion of the Delaware Legislature has already been noticed.
Easily distinguished in principle from the opposition in Delaware were the sentiments expressed in Virginia when the equitable and generous proposal of the President came up for consideration in the Richmond Legislature. Mr. Collier submitted to that body a preamble and resolution relative to the proposition. In the former it was said that negro slaves having been the property of their masters for two hundred and forty years, by use and custom at first, and subsequently by recognition of the public law, ought not to be, and could not justly be, interfered with in such property relation by the State, by “the people in convention assembled to alter an existing constitution, or to form one for admission into the confederacy, nor by the representatives of the people of the State in the Confederate Legislature, nor by any means or mode which the popular majority might adopt; and that the State, whilst remaining republican in the structure of its government, can lawfully get rid of that species of property, if ever, only by the free consent of the individual owners.” For the State to deprive an individual of this species of property would contravene the indispensable principles of free government. This view, as further explained by its author, denied the power of even a majority, in making a new State constitution, to disturb a preëxisting and resident property.[[248]]
Three days after sending his recommendation to Congress, the President wrote privately to Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times:
I am grateful to the New York journals and not less so to the “Times” than to others, for their kind notices of the late special message to Congress.
Your paper, however, intimates that the proposition, though well intentioned, must fail on the score of expense. I do hope you will reconsider this. Have you noticed the facts that less than one-half day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at $400 per head—that eighty-seven days’ cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those States to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense?
Please look at these things and consider whether there should not be another article in the “Times.”[[249]]
By his request those Congressmen from the border States then in Washington called, March 10, on Mr. Lincoln, who explained that his recent message was not inimical to the interests they represented. In the progress of the war, slaves would come into camps and continual irritation be thus maintained. In the border States that condition kept alive a feeling of hostility to the Government. He told them further “that emancipation was a subject exclusively under the control of the States, and must be adopted or rejected by each for itself.”[[250]]
Relative to this interview a memorandum of the Hon. John W. Crisfield, one of the Maryland Representatives present, contains the following entry: “He [the President] was constantly annoyed by conflicting and antagonistic complaints; on the one side a certain class complained if the slave was not protected by the army; persons were frequently found who, participating in these views, acted in a way unfriendly to the slave-holder; on the other hand, slaveholders complained that their rights were interfered with, their slaves induced to abscond and protected within the lines; these complaints were numerous, loud and deep; were a serious annoyance to him and embarrassing to the progress of the war ... [they] strengthened the hopes of the Confederates that at some day the border States would unite with them, and thus tend to prolong the war; and he was of opinion, if this resolution should be adopted by Congress and accepted by our [the border slaveholding] States, these causes of irritation and these hopes would be removed, and more would be accomplished toward shortening the war than could be hoped from the greatest victory achieved by Union armies; ... that he did not claim nor had this Government any right to coerce them” to accept the proposition.